this sunday morning news is brought to you by the letters T, E and D

_posted in film | photography | sunday morning news catch up | the world | web | 22 July 2007

today on sunday morning news catchup, ive spent a lot of time watching presentations from TED, which by the way is one of my most favorite things ever. i've missed a few great presentations and decided to go back and check them out.

James Nachtwey

james nachtwey has been one of my favorite photographers since forever. his images bring a serious reality and tell stories to those of us who are disconnected by time and location. It's great to hear him talk in detail about some of his photographs. if you haven't seen war photographer, a documentary on nachtwey, its worth netflixing.

TED Prize Wish: Share a vital story with the world

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war photographer

Majora Carter

"Economic degradation begets environmental degradation begets social degradation."
Majora Carter is at the same time; incredibly passionate, extremely knowledgeable and lovely in a way only a person whose beliefs runs her life can be.

TED Talk: Greening the Ghetto

sustainable south bronx website

_soundcheck: femi kuti: shoki shoki

sunday morning news catch up and thus africa... and TED.

_posted in film | sunday morning news catch up | the world | web | 22 July 2007

on friday night, femi kuti fed my soul and made me long for africa even more.

lately i've been talking to a variety of people about africa in general and about specific issues. i find that the majority of the people know only about HIV/AIDS, starving ethiopia babies with balloon stomachs, rebels and civil wars. some are aware of darfur and blood diamonds; let's be honest, because hollywood has started making movies about it.

african babies are the new bling in hollywood. as well as lending your star power to a cause, which is all well and good, but how about using your starpower and your own money to help build up industry in these countries you so want to help? why doesn't bono hold an economic/investment conference since he wants to save all the africans? the only aid most african countries need, is the aid of economic stability and those willing to invest in not only the economic situation, but the people. something about teaching a man to fish comes to mind.

most people still think that africa is just those living in huts, dancing for white missionaries, child soldiers, as well as corrupt governments. all these things do exist, but there is a part of africa that is not seen by most people. okonjo-iweala says it better than i ever did, "nobody knows but a few smart people."

my belief is once african countries are allowed (and why should it be others allowing them) to trade and create economies around THEIR own natural resources and goods, the other problems will decline and permanently so.

it's safe to say that the united states and other western countries' policies are based on economics. we willing overlook human rights violations to allow for economic consideration. look to china as a great example. who cares about their human rights violations when we have such a strong economic relationship with them? who cares about their african investments that also raise an eyebrow when they give us cheap goods? talk about accepting your inner capitalist.

anyway, check out ngozi okonjo-iweala, first female finance minister of nigeria. and a few other pieces i thought were worth mentioning

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

i liked a great deal of what okonjo-iweala says, but i did find her history (20 years) with the world bank unsettling. if there ever where an evil empire, i truly believe the world bank and the imf (international monetary fund) answer to that name.

TED Talk: How to help Africa? Do business there

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Dead in the Water

Africa Open for Business

Jacqueline Novogratz

TED Talk: Investing in Africa's own solutions

Novogratz's opening story reminded me of the t-shirt travels which is an insightful look into the reality of charity and commerce.

Emily Oster

TED Talk: What do we really know about the spread of AIDS?

Bill Clinton

TED Prize wish: Let's build a health care system in Rwanda

_soundcheck: femi kuti: shoki shoki

"I guess while I was there, the general attitude was, A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi"

_posted in sunday morning news catch up | 15 July 2007

this sunday has been news intensive for me, and i thought that the format should change a bit for sunday morning news catchup. i know a lot of the articles are extremely long, but the rule on sundays is the television doesn't come on until after 12noon. this allows me to seriously take time to catchup on what's going on in the world. i've added more articles, but one liners about them.

this week's articles about iraq were intense. so i only focused on the one that struck a serious cord with me. i think this is a great example of what we aren't hearing in mainstream news outlets.

The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness

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Many of these veterans returned home deeply disturbed by the disparity between the reality of the war and the way it is portrayed by the US government and American media.

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"And if you find something, then you'll detain him. If not, you'll say, 'Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.' So you've just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you've destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes."

quote 3

According to a May report from the Government Accountability Office, the Defense Department issued nearly $31 million in solatia and condolence payments between 2003 and 2006 to civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan who were "killed, injured or incur[red] property damage as a result of U.S. or coalition forces' actions during combat." The study characterizes the payments as "expressions of sympathy or remorse...but not an admission of legal liability or fault." In Iraq, according to the report, civilians are paid up to $2,500 for death, as much as $1,500 for serious injuries and $200 or more for minor injuries.

quote 4

On one occasion, in Ramadi in late 2004, a man happened to drive down a road with his family minutes after a suicide bomber had hit a barrier during a cordon-and-search operation, Lieutenant Morgenstein said. The car's brakes failed and marines fired. The wife and her two children managed to escape from the car, but the man was fatally hit. The family was mistakenly told that he had survived, so Lieutenant Morgenstein had to set the record straight. "I've never done this before," he said. "I had to go tell this woman that her husband was actually dead. We gave her money, we gave her, like, ten crates of water, we gave the kids, I remember, maybe it was soccer balls and toys. We just didn't really know what else to do."

Simpson Family Values

the american family at its best.

Influences: Werner Herzog

i'm not sure how I feel about werner herzog, some days i think he's a mad genius, other days i think he just a mad man.

Boys (and Girls) of Summer

the fact the stuart klawans evokes lenin's "useful idiots" in a review of live free or die hard makes him one of my new favorites. as a woman i notice the trend in film and television of emasculating men, or making them "inadequate" in order for their character arcs to exist, or even to make women in films look stronger.

Slimmed-down school curriculum aims to free quarter of timetable for pupils aged 11 to 14

how do you say hitler and churchill are no longer compulsory in education, while william wilberforce is? could it be because there was a recent film about wilberforce? reminds me of a few in los angeles who wanted to remove algebra as a required course, since so many students fail it... yea, thats the real solution...

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_soundcheck: monday morning blue no. 1

"Good thing I'm not an idealist-I'm just here for the money."

_posted in africa | sunday morning news catch up | the world | 08 July 2007

there's some guy claiming that the press ties the hands of those fighting the war on terror, suggesting that there should be another my-lai massacre like the one in vietnam. that alone will solve all the problems with terror, killing civilians in cold blood. thomas friedman has always been on of my favorite columnist, but i've never agreed with his views on globalization aka neocolonialism. i need to read some of samir amin's work. speaking of neocolonialism, danny glover takes the imf and world bank to task in his latest film, bamako.

The Taliban's Opium War

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A great dust cloud formed as the A.T.V.s hyperkinetically whizzed past us and the trucks kicked up plumes of swirling yellow powder. Picking up speed, Lockyear exclaimed, "This is redneck heaven. You get to run around the desert on A.T.V.s and pickups, shoot guns, and get paid for it. Man, it's the perfect job!"

quote 2

"How long have you been growing poppies?" Wankel asked him. The farmer looked surprised. "When I was born, I saw the poppies," he said.

When we were ready to move on, the farmer said, as if to be polite, "Thank you-but I can't really thank you, because you haven't destroyed just my poppies but my wheat, too." He pointed to where A.T.V.s had driven through a wheat patch. Wankel apologized, then commented that it was only one small section. "But you have also damaged my watermelons," the farmer insisted, pointing to another part of the field. "Now I will have nothing left."

Wankel turned away. As we walked on, the farmer called out, "Are you destroying all the poppies or just my field?"

quote 3

Hook, a former Army man and prison guard, had been hired by DynCorp just the month before. One morning, he said, "The real problem in this war on terror is you guys, the press. Ties our hands. The only way to fight this is to give them back the same medicine, like Operation Phoenix, in Vietnam. My Lai-what Calley did there was probably just on orders."

quote 4

Back at camp, everyone was in a bad mood. Hook, the former prison guard, remarked, "We ought to take all those guys and hang them in public, beginning with the governor." He laughed, and added, "Good thing I'm not an idealist-I'm just here for the money."

Sorry, Thomas Friedman, the World Is Round

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But, like all revolutions, this one will have its winners and losers. Of the former, most obvious are corporate CEOs who will fatten their bottom line by tapping into the vast reservoir of cheap foreign labor. On the other side is Joe Six Pack, who will suffer from a net loss in American jobs. Much of the success of Friedman's book lies in his dire warnings to Americans that they are on the verge of a major crisis. Not only are hard-working, low-wage Indian workers stealing their jobs, but hard-working, tech-savvy Chinese students are increasingly taking seats in top undergrad and graduate college programs. And, Friedman frets, if America doesn't wake up, it will face a potentially disastrous decline: Or, as Infosys's CEO Nilekani later explains, the American middle class "has not yet grasped the competitive intensity of the future. Unless they [do], they will not make the investments in reskilling themselves, and you will end up with a lot of people stranded on an island."

quote 2

According to Amin, the ethic of liberalism -- "Long live competition, may the strong win" -- is now ravaging societies of the Third World, causing further "social alienation and pauperization of urban classes."

"What is going to become of these billions of human beings, already for the most part, the poor among the poor?"... In this drive to satisfy the insatiable hunger for new markets of its Western clients, the WTO is sanctioning a process that will "destroy -- in human terms -- entire societies."

Bamako: Danny Glover Produces and Stars in New Film Putting the World Bank and IMF on Trial in Africa

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And Bamako is the capital of Mali -- that he began to weave this story where we have men and women who are traumatized and who are dismissed by globalization. They're the ones who give testimony. So it's their story. It's them -- they're saying, in a most brilliant way, how globalization has impacted their life, how the IMF and the World Bank and structural adjustments and conditionalities have impacted their life, and the structural violence that it's caused in their life. This courtyard has people who are unemployed, women who dye fabrics, which is a dying art in Africa, anyway. Most of the fabrics are now dyed somewhere else, particularly in China. And so, this is just -- then they unfolded this story, and then, not only that story, that within the story the court happening, you see the life, the teeming life, the life of the people as they go through the day-to-day aspects of survival.

quote 2

Imagine if we even look at our own lives here, in reference to what is happening in areas in this country where people are in slums and in inner cities. We don't know what's really happening in those areas themselves.

quote 3

You, Harry Belafonte, Nelson Mandela, the Congressional Black Caucus, progressives throughout the country have been talking about getting rid of this debt and then promoting trade. And nothing, Danny, is more disturbing to me than last week's announcement that the US was building a huge military base in Africa. Question: what for?

_soundcheck: tinariwen: the radio tisdas sessions

C.R.S. - Can't Remember Shit syndrome

_posted in photography | sunday morning news catch up | the world | 01 July 2007

this week has been filled with news about the supreme courts decision and since my last post was about that, there are no links in sunday morning news catch up. but there are some interesting articles, none the less.

The end of photojournalism

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In Europe, German photojournalistic magazines were influenced by the Soviet films of Eisenstein and Pudovkin. In the 1930s Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and David 'Chim' Seymour - co-founders of Magnum - worked for Ce Soir, the communist daily newspaper. Cartier-Bresson also contributed to Regards, the communist illustrated weekly. Photojournalism was a left-wing occupation. Photographers, agents and editors, forced out of Germany and Hungary by Hitler, took their craft to Britain and the US.

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The Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) gave unemployed photographers jobs so they could record the trauma of the American Depression and the triumphs of the New Deal. Later, Congress wanted to destroy the FSA's 270,000 negatives as un-American. They were saved and are now in the Library of Congress. Some 20 years ago Nick Hedges almost persuaded the Labour government to support a similar project in Britain. It went to Cabinet, but collapsed when the Conservatives won the election.

The General's Report

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"The whole idea that Rumsfeld projects - 'We're here to protect the nation from terrorism' - is an oxymoron," Taguba said. "He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they've dragged a lot of officers with them."

quote 2

The former senior intelligence official said that when the images of Abu Ghraib were published, there were some in the Pentagon and the White House who "didn't think the photographs were that bad" - in that they put the focus on enlisted soldiers, rather than on secret task-force operations. Referring to the task-force members, he said, "Guys on the inside ask me, 'What's the difference between shooting a guy on the street, or in his bed, or in a prison?'" A Pentagon consultant on the war on terror also said that the "basic strategy was 'prosecute the kids in the photographs but protect the big picture.'"

quote 3

"From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service," Taguba said. "And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable."

Are You There, George? It's Me, Ava.

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ava's website

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It remains to be seen, however, whether such virtual, viral efforts can serve as a replacement, or even a stimulus, for face-to-face networks such as church groups or labor unions.

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At an early age, Ava revealed herself to be more zealously political than her parents, and more left-leaning. By the seventh grade, she had persuaded her mom to let her be homeschooled. Ava didn't fit in at regular school, being more interested in the Electoral College than the latest gossip. She told me her teachers teased her for wearing a Gore-Lieberman T-shirt or reading Dude, Where's My Country? in homeroom.

_soundcheck: femi kuti: do your best

"We asked for workers, but we got people."

_posted in africa | sunday morning news catch up | the world | 24 June 2007

on most sunday mornings i read news i may have missed during the week or just honestly didnt have time to get to... so i thought i should post the most interesting ones...

those who know me know im all about learning about what's going on in the world, the shit thats not on cnn and the rest of the 24hour crappers. charlie rose is my favorite interviewer... amy goodman is close behind... i love the new yorker and think it should be required reading for all americans regardless of your political lean... if there's anything that can teach staying power and in depth understanding of a subject, its a new yorker article... the norm is at least 9 pages for any article... and you do walk away a more informed citizen...

anyway.. on to the news...

Aborigines lose right to run their lands over child sex abuse scandal

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"I'm absolutely disgusted by this patronising government control. Tying drinking with welfare payments is just disgusting. If they're going to do that, they're going to have to do that with every single person in Australia, not just black people."

In a World on the Move, a Tiny Land Strains to Cope

my introduction to amilcar cabral was the first time i saw chris marker's Sans Soleil

Full Article

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An estimated 200 million people live outside the country of their birth, and they help support a swath of the developing world as big if not bigger. Migrants sent home about $300 billion last year — nearly three times the world's foreign aid budgets combined. Those sums are building houses, educating children and seeding small businesses, and they have made migration central to discussions about how to help the global poor. A leading academic text calls this the "Age of Migration."

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Countries that want migrant muscle and brains also want more border control. Many of them see illegal migrants as a security threat, especially in a terrorist age, and worry that large-scale migration, even when legal, can undercut wages, require costly services and subject national identities to bonfires of religious and cultural conflict.

In Ethiopia, Fear and Cries of Army Brutality

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In village after village, people said they had been brutalized by government troops. They described a widespread and longstanding reign of terror, with Ethiopian soldiers gang-raping women, burning down huts and killing civilians at will.

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It is the same military that the American government helps train and equip - and provides with prized intelligence.

The Possessed

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"In general, anything that is patrimony of the cultures of the world, whether in museums in Asia or Europe or the United States, came to be there during the times when our governments were weak and the laws were weak, or during the Roman conquest or our conquest by the Spanish. Now that the world is more civilized, these countries should reflect on this issue. It saddens us Peruvians to go to museums abroad and see a Paracas textile. I am hopeful that in the future all the cultural patrimony of the world will return to its country of origin."

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Because she is of European origin, she was derided by her many enemies as la gringa and dismissed as the particular sort of gringa who latches onto indigenous styles in a sentimental and condescending way.

Incredible Eddie

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"I gave up caring about my career $80m ago."

Self-Described Economic Hit Man John Perkins: "We Have Created the World's First Truly Global Empire"

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I can make sure that this man makes a great deal of money, he and his family, through contracts, through various quasi-legal means, and I can also- if he doesn't accept this, you know, the same thing is going to happen to him that happened to Jaime Roldos in Ecuador and Omar Torrijos in Panama and Allende in Chile, and we tried to do it to Chavez in Venezuela and are still trying - that we will send in the people to try to overthrow him, as, in fact, we recently did with the President of Ecuador, or if we don't overthrow him, we'll assassinate him.

_soundcheck: mokobe: mon afrique